Quote of the Day

……Adding to the fertile soil for legalistic parachurch gurus to adversely influence churches and individuals is the modern idea that we must have experts in every area of life.  Rarely does a week go by that I (as a pastor) fail to receive a call informing me of a new video series that is "must viewing" for every church body.  The expert on marriage relationships; the expert on child rearing; the expert on interpersonal relationships; the expert on this; the expert on that has made a video series.  Surely no mere pastor can keep up with 'the experts.'  And so, we are encouraged to turn our churches over to Dr. ___________.  After all, he or she supposedly knows more than any of the rest of us, and if we will just do what he or she says, we will all succeed in our Christian lives.  This is not intended to be a blanket condemnation of everything and everyone who is part of what might be called a parachurch ministry.  However, any and every time the parachruch dictates to the church rather than the other way around, parachurch is out of place.  And any individual who follows a parachurch ministry more closely than his own local church has a definite problem with his priorities, since parachruch organizations are never mentioned in the Bible…….If you listen to those trying to sell many of these products you are likely to conclude that pastors just aren't necessary anymore.  And why would anyone in the pew want to listen to old 'what's -his- name' week after week when they could be listening to 'the expert!'

Robert Pruitt

Quote of the Day

It is not imitation that makes sons. It is sonship that make imitators.

  

Martin Luther

Quote of the Day

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith or delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; toward disobedience and call it freedom; toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the non-discipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

D. A. Carson

Quote of the Day

We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcase of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.  It is true, of course, that we have paid the doctrine of pure grace divine honors unparalleled in Christendom, in fact we have exalted that doctrine to the position of God himself.   Everywhere Luther's formula has been repeated, but its truth perverted into self-deception.  So long as our Church holds the correct doctrine of justification, there is no doubt whatever that she is a justified Church!  So they said, thinking that we must vindicate our Lutheran heritage by making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms.  To be 'Lutheran' must mean that we leave the following of Christ to legalists, Calvinists, and enthusiasts - and all this for the sake of grace.  We justified the world, and condemned as heretics those who tried to follow Christ.  The result was that a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship.  The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap.   Cheap grace had won the day.

But do we also realize that this cheap grace has turned back upon us like a boomerang?  The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.  We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition.  Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving.  We poured forth unending streams of grace.  But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.  Where were those truths which impelled the early Church to institute the catechumenate, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world, and afforded adequate protection for costly grace?  What had happened to all those warnings of Luther's against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living?  Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing the world than this?  What are those three thousand Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the millions of spiritual corpses in the country to-day?  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer